Since New York is still a walking city,
and New Yorkers are only gradually
getting used to buying shoes and groceries
on the Internet when so many stores
are close at hand, our main culture of
consumption remains window shopping.
It’s free, it’s convenient, and it enables us
to see what is happening to our neighborhoods
when they are challenged by
chain store invasion, rampant gentrification,
and ethnic turnovers. Until recently,
many areas of the city were dotted with
small mom and pop stores selling goods
you could not find anywhere else—and
often, at discount prices. Now, however,
chains like Barnes & Noble, Starbucks,
and H&M colonize the most heavily traf-
ficked streets.
They create a more standardized shopping experience than New
York is known for—repeating nearly
the same clusters of stores on Broadway
in SoHo, where Prada’s pricey leather
handbags face cheap cashmere sweaters
down the street at Uniqlo, as on Lower
Fifth Avenue near Union Square and 34th
Street near Macy’s.

The Erosion and Rebirth of
American Democracy

Polls show the continued deterioration of the United States’ image in the
world. The main causes are the occupation of Iraq, torture, the detention of
prisoners at Guantanamo, U.S. policy in the Middle East, and the government’s
positions on global warming. However, comparable surveys show
strong support for the values that America embodies and that President Bush
has vowed to spread. It looks, according to a BBC report, “as though America
itself is seen to be living up to those values less and less.”

Too Few PhDs?
The Replacement Rate in Sociology

For years, the academic community
heard the complaint that there were
“too many PhDs” in sociology and other
social science disciplines, and that the
number should be limited because of
the lack of professional positions that
use doctoral training. Yet, computations
based on data from two National
Science Foundation surveys, the Survey
of Earned Doctorates (SED), the annual
survey of the universe of new PhDs,
and the Survey of Doctoral Recipients,
a sample survey that uses the SED as
its population universe may cast some
doubt on this complaint.